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I haven’t drawn any air yet, maybe that’s why. Black spots are swimming in my vision. My lungs burn and my heart is knocking about in my chest. I stumble to the window, try to open the latch but it won’t budge.
Fucking shit.
“Matt?” Her voice. Her steps. She’s inside my room, coming up behind me. I’d hoped she’d head downstairs to check on the kids. “Are you all right?”
Not sure I ever will be. I shove at the latch again, manage to throw the window open and lean outside, struggling to draw some air.
She doesn’t ask anything else, just rubs my back, between my shoulder blades, and it feels good. Much better than it has any right to.
It eases my breathing like nothing else has managed to—not the whiskey, not the smokes, not punching the walls and anyone in my path.
I close my eyes and let her touch ground me. She presses herself to my back, a reversal of our positions, her soft curves and sweet scent a balm to the jagged pain in my chest.
“You’re hurt,” she says softly, and I have no clue what she’s talking about. “Your hand. What happened?”
I realize I’ve been rubbing at my left wrist. “It’s nothing.”
“It’s a scar,” she says slowly and steps beside me, takes my hand in hers, and I’m too exhausted to stop her. “Under the ink. Matt…”
I see the horror dawning in her gaze. But hell, I’m done hiding. Done running.
The end of the road. I thought that. I said that.
“I’m fine,” I grind out. I pull my hand away, and she claps hers over her mouth, her eyes glassy.
“You tried to kill yourself?”
I think about that. “I fucking wanted to.”
Tears escape her eyes.
I frown, reach up and wipe them with my thumb. “But I didn’t.”
Because I knew exactly what to do. How to do it. How to cut. I read up on it. I wasn’t gonna to a half-assed job.
Which is exactly what I did. I botched it. I hesitated. Because I wasn’t sure I wanted to die.
That’s why I’m still alive.
She takes again my hand, traces the scar with her fingertip. I shiver. The scar is raised, half-numb, and her touch sends uneasy shivers down my spine. “No, you didn’t,” she whispers.
That scar is a hesitation wound. That’s what it’s called. The doctor told me later. I cut deep enough that it affected some tendons in my arm, and a nerve in my hand, but otherwise I got off easy.
I flex my hand and she gives me a soft smile, her cheeks still wet. “You never really mourned her, did you? Your wife.”
What’s this have to do with it? “Of course I did.”
I drank and cut myself and tried to… to end it.
But fuck, no, I never really buried her. In my mind, she’d always walk back through the door one day. Her ghost has always been with me.
I don’t know what she sees in my face as the new hit is driven home—the fact I’ve been haunted all this time and never even realized—but she throws her arms around me and rests her cheek on my chest.
“It’ll be okay, Matt,” she whispers. “You’ll be okay.”
I didn’t know I needed to hear that, but fuck, I did. How did she know? I’ll be okay, I’ll be there for my kids, and for the first time I think I may start to believe it.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
